So You’ve Decided to Reduce Your Company’s Carbon Footprint…

It seem as if all of us Triple P bloggers have carbon on the brain this week. This is no surprise given the Fourth IPCC Report findings recently released. If we are going to somehow attempt to reduce the 70 million tons of carbon released globally into the air each day, it is time that managers become intimately familiar with the nitty-gritty business of carbon reduction strategies. For this, we can look no further than the concise and practical guide entitled: Carbon Strategies; How Leading Companies are Reducing Their Climate Change Footprint, by Andrew Hoffman.

This text, originally commissioned by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, provides step-by-step guidelines to implementing climate-related corporate policies. These steps include how to conduct an emissions profile assessment, gauge risks and opportunities, evaluate options for technological solutions, and set goals and targets. In order to get buy-in for the implementation of these policies in your corporation, there is also information on how to develop financial mechanisms to support a climate change strategy and engage senior leadership. To communicate your organization’s climate strategy to relevant stakeholders, there is a third section that details how to manage external relations and supply-chain partnerships. Finally, the book also includes six case studies of multinationals that have successfully integrated the steps outlined above. What is most fascinating about this “how-to” guide is the attention paid to individual differences between companies based on specific sector, industries, or regions. The experiences of individual companies are used to demonstrate the variability in carbon measuring and reduction strategies. “Ultimately, the most effective climate-related strategies connect GHG reductions with a company’s core business strategy,” Hoffman writes.

Shannon Arvizu, Ph.D., is a clean tech educator and cutting-edge consultant for the auto industry. You can follow her test drives in the cars of the future at www.misselectric.com.